eBird Birding Hotspots

Birding is one of the most popular and fastest growing hobbies in the United States.

http://ebird.org is one of the websites for Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology. On this site they provide a Google Earth file (KMZ) of all of the "Birding Hotspots" that they use to tabulate bird sightings and counts. This file contains over 18,000 locations in this database. All of these locations have been vetted and are accessible by the public. (None of these sites should be on private lands)

The coverage of this file is all of North America along with more limited distribution of sites in Central & South America.

From their website;
"The hotspots created and maintained by the eBird community are the property of all eBird users. As such, we make a downloadable file of these available for use with Google Earth, so that birders can have access to these locations away from eBird."

Density of the Hot Spots varies depending on location, with some being exceedingly rich. Setting up Alerts is not recommended!

If you need to use the alerts, the alert sound "eBird Birding Hotspot.mp3" is an American Robin and might be the best choice if you are out in the field.

The alert "eBird Birding Hotspot2.mp3" is a generated voice.

Since eBird maintains the original files, any suggestions for new locations or corrections should be addressed to them.

I converted the current eBird Hotspots KMZ file (Dated July 7th, 2008) to the GPX file here using POIEdit and works on my Nuvi 260.